Lead Institution: Carnegie Mellon University; Principal Investigator: Takeo Kanade Core Partner Institution: University of Pittsburgh; Co-Principal Investigator: Rory A. Cooper Affiliated Outreach Institutions: Florida/Georgia LSAMP, Howard Univ., Lincoln Univ.
The Quality of Life Technologies Engineering Research Center (QoLT ERC) will transform lives in a large and growing segment of the population - people with reduced functional capabilities due to aging or disability. Future compassionate intelligent QoLT systems, either individual devices or technology-embedded environments, will monitor and communicate with a person, understand daily needs and tasks, and provide reliable and happily-accepted assistance by compensating and substituting for diminished capabilities.
Intellectual Merit: The QoLT ERC will create the scientific and engineering knowledge base that enables systematic development of human-centered intelligent systems that co-exist and co-work with people, particularly people with impairments. These QoLT systems may be an individual device that a person carries or wears, a mobility system that a person rides or that accompanies the person, an environment that is instrumented, or a combination of these. The QoLT ERC research will build upon recent advances in intelligent system technologies, including machine perception, robotics, learning, communication, and miniaturization, many of which have been created and applied to date mainly to industry, military, and entertainment. The QoLT ERC will transform these advances and develop new technologies for perceiving, reasoning with, and affecting people improving their lives. Many previous attempts to use sophisticated technology to enhance function for people with disabilities failed. One reason for those failures was a limited understanding of the human with disability and a lack of tight integration of technical and clinical expertise with users' needs. The QoLT ERC will overcome these barriers through partnership of Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh in four thrust areas: Monitoring & Modeling, Mobility & Manipulation, Human-System Interface, and Person & Society, and by working closely with user groups throughout design, development, test, and deployment phases. The team has technical strengths in intelligent systems, rehabilitation engineering, and related clinical areas, and ample access to real-world testbeds.
Broader Impacts: The technologies that the QoLT ERC develops will enable people with disabilities to independently perform activities of daily living. By restoring and preserving independence they can pursue individual goals and more fully participate in society. To have more people gainfully employed and to reduce the need for or delay the onset of institutionalization will have the ultimate impact on national economy. The QoLT ERC will expand the pools of talented students in two fronts: the pool of engineering students, with substantial clinical and socio-economic training and experiences that will motive them to create technologies for quality of life; and the pool of clinically-oriented students with engineering training and experiences that will help them understand how best to integrate technology into their practices. It will also teach students how to collaborate effectively one of the most recognized and yet difficult-to-overcome challenges in the development and implementation of systems for people's use. The fact that our ERC team includes a significant number of women faculty and faculty with disabilities will have a major impact on diversity. They serve as role models, and encourage extensive participation of women and people with disabilities in the ERC as faculty, students, advisors, and clients. The membership of the QoLT ERC industry consortium includes a wide spectrum of companies pertaining to all aspects of daily life: medical devices, assistive technology, information technology, consumer electronics, healthcare, and insurance. The QoLT ERC will catalyze a large and technologically sophisticated industry sector that ultimately will help all of us to function more capably, perceptively, and intelligently.
